1.
Mary Todd Lincoln
–
Mary Ann Todd Lincoln was the wife of the 16th President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, and was First Lady of the United States from 1861 to 1865. She dropped the name Ann after her sister, Ann Todd, was born. A member of a large, wealthy Kentucky family, Mary was well educated, after living in the Todd House and finishing school during her teens, she moved to Springfield, Illinois, where she lived with her married sister Elizabeth Edwards. Before she married Abraham Lincoln, Mary was courted by his political opponent Stephen A. Douglas. She and Lincoln had four sons together, only one of whom outlived her and their home of about 17 years still stands at Eighth and Jackson Streets in Springfield, Illinois. She supported her throughout his presidency. She witnessed his fatal shooting when they were together in the Presidents Box at Fords Theatre on Tenth Street in Washington, Mary was involuntarily institutionalized for psychiatric disease ten years after her husbands murder. She also complained of physical symptoms during her adult life. Mary was born in Lexington, Kentucky as the fourth of seven children of Robert Smith Todd, a banker and her family were slaveholders, and Mary was raised in comfort and refinement. When Mary was six, her mother died, two years later, her father married Elizabeth Betsy Humphreys and they had nine children together. Mary had a relationship with her stepmother. From 1832, Mary and her family lived in what is now known as the Mary Todd Lincoln House, Marys paternal great-grandfather, David Levi Todd, was born in County Longford, Ireland, and immigrated through Pennsylvania to Kentucky. Her great-great maternal grandfather Samuel McDowell was born in Scotland, other Todd ancestors came from England. At an early age Mary was sent to Madame Mantelles finishing school and she learned to speak French fluently and studied dance, drama, music, and social graces. By age 20, she was regarded as witty and gregarious, like her family, she was a Whig. Mary began living with her sister Elizabeth Porter Edwards in Springfield, Elizabeth, married to Ninian W. Edwards, son of a former governor, served as Marys guardian. Mary Todd married Abraham Lincoln on November 4,1842, at her sister Elizabeths home in Springfield and she was 23 years old and he was 33 years of age. Their four sons, all born in Springfield, were, Robert Todd Lincoln, -– lawyer, diplomat, businessman
2.
Abraham Lincoln
–
Abraham Lincoln was an American politician and lawyer who served as the 16th President of the United States from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. Lincoln led the United States through its Civil War—its bloodiest war and perhaps its greatest moral, constitutional, in doing so, he preserved the Union, abolished slavery, strengthened the federal government, and modernized the economy. Born in Hodgenville, Kentucky, Lincoln grew up on the frontier in Kentucky. Largely self-educated, he became a lawyer in Illinois, a Whig Party leader, elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1846, Lincoln promoted rapid modernization of the economy through banks, tariffs, and railroads. Reentering politics in 1854, he became a leader in building the new Republican Party, in 1860, Lincoln secured the Republican Party presidential nomination as a moderate from a swing state. Though he gained little support in the slaveholding states of the South. Subsequently, on April 12,1861, a Confederate attack on Fort Sumter inspired the North to enthusiastically rally behind the Union. Politically, Lincoln fought back by pitting his opponents against each other, by carefully planned political patronage and his Gettysburg Address became an iconic endorsement of the principles of nationalism, republicanism, equal rights, liberty, and democracy. Lincoln initially concentrated on the military and political dimensions of the war and his primary goal was to reunite the nation. He suspended habeas corpus, leading to the ex parte Merryman decision. Lincoln closely supervised the war effort, especially the selection of top generals, including his most successful general, Lincoln tried repeatedly to capture the Confederate capital at Richmond, each time a general failed, Lincoln substituted another, until finally Grant succeeded. As the war progressed, his moves toward ending slavery included the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. On April 14,1865, five days after the surrender of Confederate commanding general Robert E. Lee, Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, a Confederate sympathizer. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton launched a manhunt for Booth, and 12 days later on April 26, Lincoln has been consistently ranked both by scholars and the public as among the greatest U. S. presidents. Abraham Lincoln was born February 12,1809, the child of Thomas and Nancy Hanks Lincoln, in a one-room log cabin on the Sinking Spring Farm near Hodgenville. He was a descendant of Samuel Lincoln, an Englishman who migrated from Hingham, Norfolk to its namesake of Hingham, samuels grandson and great-grandson began the familys western migration, which passed through New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. Lincolns paternal grandfather and namesake, Captain Abraham Lincoln, moved the family from Virginia to Jefferson County, Captain Lincoln was killed in an Indian raid in 1786. His children, including eight-year-old Thomas, the presidents father
3.
Photography
–
Typically, a lens is used to focus the light reflected or emitted from objects into a real image on the light-sensitive surface inside a camera during a timed exposure. With an electronic sensor, this produces an electrical charge at each pixel. A negative image on film is used to photographically create a positive image on a paper base, known as a print. The word photography was created from the Greek roots φωτός, genitive of φῶς, light and γραφή representation by means of lines or drawing, several people may have coined the same new term from these roots independently. Johann von Maedler, a Berlin astronomer, is credited in a 1932 German history of photography as having used it in an article published on 25 February 1839 in the German newspaper Vossische Zeitung. Both of these claims are now widely reported but apparently neither has ever been confirmed as beyond reasonable doubt. Credit has traditionally given to Sir John Herschel both for coining the word and for introducing it to the public. Photography is the result of combining several technical discoveries, later Greek mathematicians Aristotle and Euclid also independently described a pinhole camera in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE. Daniele Barbaro described a diaphragm in 1566, wilhelm Homberg described how light darkened some chemicals in 1694. The fiction book Giphantie, published in 1760, by French author Tiphaigne de la Roche, the discovery of the camera obscura that provides an image of a scene dates back to ancient China. Leonardo da Vinci mentions natural camera obscura that are formed by dark caves on the edge of a sunlit valley, a hole in the cave wall will act as a pinhole camera and project a laterally reversed, upside down image on a piece of paper. So the birth of photography was primarily concerned with inventing means to capture, renaissance painters used the camera obscura which, in fact, gives the optical rendering in color that dominates Western Art. The camera obscura literally means dark chamber in Latin and it is a box with a hole in it which allows light to go through and create an image onto the piece of paper. Around the year 1800, British inventor Thomas Wedgwood made the first known attempt to capture the image in a camera obscura by means of a light-sensitive substance and he used paper or white leather treated with silver nitrate. The shadow images eventually darkened all over, the first permanent photoetching was an image produced in 1822 by the French inventor Nicéphore Niépce, but it was destroyed in a later attempt to make prints from it. Niépce was successful again in 1825, in 1826 or 1827, he made the View from the Window at Le Gras, the earliest surviving photograph from nature. Because Niépces camera photographs required a long exposure, he sought to greatly improve his bitumen process or replace it with one that was more practical. With an eye to eventual commercial exploitation, the partners opted for total secrecy, Daguerres efforts culminated in what would later be named the daguerreotype process
4.
Ghost
–
In folklore, a ghost is the soul or spirit of a dead person or animal that can appear to the living. Descriptions of ghosts vary widely from a presence to translucent or barely visible wispy shapes, to realistic. The deliberate attempt to contact the spirit of a person is known as necromancy. The belief in the existence of an afterlife, as well as manifestations of the spirits of the dead is widespread, certain religious practices—funeral rites, exorcisms, and some practices of spiritualism and ritual magic—are specifically designed to rest the spirits of the dead. Ghosts are generally described as solitary, human-like essences, though stories of ghostly armies and they are believed to haunt particular locations, objects, or people they were associated with in life. Ghosts exist as a concept only, despite centuries of investigation, the English word ghost continues Old English gást, from a hypothetical Common Germanic *gaistaz. It is common to West Germanic, but lacking in North Germanic, the pre-Germanic form was *ghoisdo-s, apparently from a root denoting fury, anger reflected in Old Norse geisa to rage. The Germanic word is recorded as only, but likely continues a neuter s-stem. The original meaning of the Germanic word would thus have been a principle of the mind, in particular capable of excitation. In Germanic paganism, Germanic Mercury, and the later Odin, was at the time the conductor of the dead. It could also denote any good or evil spirit, such as angels and demons, also from the Old English period, the word could denote the spirit of God, viz. the Holy Ghost. The now-prevailing sense of the soul of a person, spoken of as appearing in a visible form only emerges in Middle English. The synonym spook is a Dutch loanword, akin to Low German spôk, alternative words in modern usage include spectre, the Scottish wraith, phantom and apparition. The term shade in classical mythology translates Greek σκιά, or Latin umbra, haint is a synonym for ghost used in regional English of the southern United States, and the haint tale is a common feature of southern oral and literary tradition. The term poltergeist is a German word, literally a noisy ghost, wraith is a Scots word for ghost, spectre, or apparition. It appeared in Scottish Romanticist literature, and acquired the general or figurative sense of portent or omen. In 18th- to 19th-century Scottish literature, it applied to aquatic spirits. The word has no commonly accepted etymology, the OED notes of obscure origin only, an association with the verb writhe was the etymology favored by J. R. R. Tolkien
5.
Spirit
–
The English word spirit, from Latin spiritus breath, has many different meanings and connotations, most of them relating to a non-corporeal substance contrasted with the material body. It can also refer to a subtle as opposed to gross material substance, the word spirit is often used metaphysically to refer to the consciousness or personality. e. A manifestation of the spirit of a deceased person, the term may also refer to any incorporeal or immaterial being, such as demons or deities. In the Bible, the Spirit, specifically denotes the Holy Spirit, the English word spirit comes from the Latin spiritus, meaning breath, but also spirit, soul, courage, vigor, ultimately from a Proto-Indo-European *peis. It is distinguished from Latin anima, soul, in Greek, this distinction exists between pneuma, breath, motile air, spirit, and psykhē, soul. The word spirit came into Middle English via Old French, the distinction between soul and spirit also developed in the Abrahamic religions, Arabic nafs opposite rūħ, Hebrew neshama or nephesh נֶ֫פֶשׁ nép̄eš opposite ruach. In a lecture delivered to the literary Society of Augsburg, October 20,1926, on the theme of “Nature and Spirit, the mistrust of verbal concepts, inconvenient as it is, nevertheless seems to me to be very much in place in speaking of fundamentals. Spirit and Life are familiar enough words to us, very old acquaintances in fact, pawns that for thousands of years have pushed back. It can scarcely be an accident onomatopoeic words like ruach, ruch, roho mean ‘spirit’ no less clearly than the Greek πνεύμα and the Latin spiritus”. In spiritual and metaphysical terms, spirit has acquired a number of meanings, An incorporeal but ubiquitous, unlike the concept of souls a spirit develops and grows as an integral aspect of a living being. This concept of the individual spirit occurs commonly in animism, note the distinction between this concept of spirit and that of the pre-existing or eternal soul, belief in souls occurs specifically and far less commonly, particularly in traditional societies. One might more properly term this type/aspect of spirit life or aether rather than spirit, people usually conceive of a ghost as a wandering spirit from a being no longer living, having survived the death of the body yet maintaining at least vestiges of mind and consciousness. In religion and spirituality, the respiration of a human has for obvious reasons become seen as linked with the very occurrence of life. A similar significance has become attached to human blood, Spirit, in this sense, means the thing that separates a living body from a corpse—and usually implies intelligence, consciousness, and sentience. Latter-day Saint prophet Joseph Smith Jr. taught that the concept of spirit as incorporeal or without substance was incorrect, all spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes. In some Native American spiritual traditions the Great Spirit or Wakan Tanka is a term for the Supreme Being, individual spirits envisaged as interconnected with all other spirits and with The Spirit. This concept relates to theories of a unified spirituality, to universal consciousness, the experience of such a connection can become a primary basis for spiritual belief. Christian spiritual theology can use the term Spirit to describe God, or aspects of God — as in the Holy Spirit, Spirit forms a central concept in pneumatology
6.
Ghost hunting
–
Ghost hunting is a fringe pseudoscience wherein its adherents visit and investigate locations that are reported to be haunted by ghosts. Typically, a ghost hunting team will attempt to evidence that they see as supportive of paranormal activity. Traditional techniques such as conducting interviews and researching the history of a site are also employed, some ghost hunters refer to themselves as a paranormal investigator. Ghost hunting has been criticized for its total absence of scientific method. Ghost hunting is considered a pseudoscience by a vast majority of educators, academics, science writers, in contrast, the concept of the ghost and narratives featuring ghosts are a topic of academic study in folkloristics. Paranormal research dates back to the 19th century, with such as the Society for Psychical Research investigating spiritual matters. Psychic researcher Harry Price published his Confessions of a Ghost-Hunter in 1936, Ghost hunting was popularised in the 2000s by television series such as Most Haunted and Ghost Hunters, combined with the increasing availability of high-tech equipment. The Atlantic Paranormal Society reported a doubling in their membership in the late 2000s, despite its lack of acceptance in academic circles, the popularity of ghost-hunting reality TV shows has influenced a number of individuals to take up the pursuit. Small businesses offering ghost-hunting equipment and paranormal investigation services increased in the early 2000s, many offer electromagnetic field meters, infrared motion sensors and devices billed as ghost detectors. One ghost-hunting group reports that the number of people taking its tours has tripled, another says its membership has doubled. Others point to increased traffic on their websites and message boards as an indication that ghost hunting is becoming more accepted, participants say that ghost hunting allows them to enjoy the friendship of like-minded people and actively pursue their interest in the paranormal. James Willis, founder of The Ghosts of Ohio group, says that his membership has grown to 30 members since it was founded in 1999 and includes both true believers and total skeptics. Willis says his group is looking for answers, one way or another, potts writes that modern ghost hunting groups ignore the scientific method and instead follow a form of techno-mysticism. The popularity of ghost hunting has led to some injuries, unaware that a spooky home in Worthington, Ohio was occupied, a group of teenagers stepped on the edge of the property to explore. The homeowner fired on the automobile as they were leaving. A woman hunting for ghosts was killed in a fall from a University of Toronto building, an offshoot of ghost hunting is the commercial ghost tour conducted by a local guide or tour operator who is often a member of a local ghost-hunting or paranormal investigation group. The city of Savannah, Georgia is said to be the American city with the most ghost tours, according to a survey conducted in October 2008 by the Associated Press and Ipsos,34 percent of Americans say they believe in the existence of ghosts. Moreover, a Gallup poll conducted on June 6–8,2005 showed that one-third of Americans believe that ghosts exist, in 2002, the National Science Foundation identified haunted houses, ghosts, and communication with the dead among pseudoscientific beliefs
7.
William H. Mumler
–
William H. Mumler was an American spirit photographer who worked in New York and Boston. His first spirit photograph was a self-portrait which developed to show his deceased cousin. Mumler then left his job as a jeweller, instead opting to work as a full-time photographer, taking advantage of the large number of people who had lost relatives in the American Civil War. Perhaps his two most famous works are the photograph of Mary Todd Lincoln with the ghost of her husband Abraham Lincoln, and his photo of Master Herrod, a medium, with three spirit guides. After being accused of various activities, he was taken to court for fraud, though found not guilty, his career was over, and he died in poverty. Today, Mumlers photos are known to be fakes, yet, they circulated widely in the following years and decades, and were marketed as objects of belief and visual curiosities both within and beyond the spiritualist movement. Before beginning his career as a photographer, Mumler worked as an jewellery engraver in Boston. In the early 1860s, he developed a self-portrait that appeared to feature the apparition of his cousin who had been dead for 12 years. This is widely credited as the first spirit photograph of a living subject featuring the likeness of a deceased person imprinted by the spirit of the deceased. Spirit photography is thought to have been a lucrative business thanks to the families of those killed during the American Civil War seeking reassurance that their relatives lived on and he was married to a famous healing medium, who conducted her own business beside her husbands. Critics of Mumlers work included P. T, according to Joe Nickell Mumler was exposed as a fraud when people recognized that some of the supposed spirits were still among the living. Mumler was brought to trial for fraud in April 1869 and those testifying in support of Mumler included Moses A. Dow, a journalist who Mumler had photographed. Though acquitted of fraud, Mumlers career was ruined, after the trial, he went on to be a photograph publisher, discovering a photo printing process from wood-cuts, known then as the Mumler process. Today, his photos are considered hoaxes, one of Mumlers most famous photographs apparently shows Mary Todd Lincoln with the ghost of her husband, Abraham Lincoln. Willin goes on to say that Mumler did not discover who she was until after the photo was developed, although the image has been dismissed as a fraudulent double exposure, it has been widely circulated. Master Herrod was a medium from Bridgewater, Massachusetts photographed by Mumler in about 1872. One photograph, once developed, apparently showed Herrod in a surrounded by the spirits of Europe. The photograph was advertised for sale in The Religio-Philosophical Journal on August 24,1872, other photographs by Mumler included pictures showing various spirits with living sitters
8.
Multiple exposure
–
The exposure values may or may not be identical to each other. Ordinarily, cameras have a sensitivity to light that is a function of time, for example, a one-second exposure is an exposure in which the camera image is equally responsive to light over the exposure time of one second. The criterion for determining that something is an exposure is that the sensitivity goes up. The simplest example of an exposure is a double exposure without flash. Some single exposures, such as flash and blur use a combination of electronic flash and this effect can be approximated by a Dirac delta measure and a constant finite rectangular window, in combination. For example, a sensitivity window comprising a Dirac comb combined with a pulse, is considered a multiple exposure. In photography and cinematography, multiple exposure is a technique in which the shutter is opened more than once to expose the film multiple times. The resulting image contains the subsequent image/s superimposed over the original, the technique is sometimes used as an artistic visual effect and can be used to create ghostly images or to add people and objects to a scene that were not originally there. It is frequently used in photographic hoaxes and it is considered easiest to have a manual winding camera for double exposures. On automatic winding cameras, as soon as a picture is taken the film is wound to the next frame. Some more advanced automatic winding cameras have the option for multiple exposures, manual winding cameras with a multiple exposure feature can be set to double-expose after making the first exposure. Since shooting multiple exposures will expose the same frame multiple times, for example, to expose the frame twice with correct exposure, a −1 EV compensation have to be done, and −2 EV for exposing four times. This may not be necessary when photographing a lit subject in two different positions against a dark background, as the background area will be essentially unexposed. Medium to low light is ideal for double exposures, a tripod may not be necessary if combining different scenes in one shot. In some conditions, for example, recording the progress of a lunar eclipse in multiple exposures. More than two exposures can be combined, with not to overexpose the film. Digital technology enables images to be superimposed over each other by using a photo editor. These enable the opacity of the images to be altered and for an image to be overlaid over another and they also can set the layers to multiply mode, which adds the colors together rather than making the colors of either image pale and translucent
9.
Mediumship
–
Mediumship is the practice of certain people —known as mediums— to purportedly mediate communication between spirits of the dead and living human beings. There are different types of mediumship including spirit channeling, and ouija, humans have been fascinated with contacting the dead since the beginning of human existence. Cave paintings by indigenous Australians date back 28,000 years, some depicting skulls, bones, spirits, Other cave paintings in Indonesia date back a further 10,000 years. Mediumship gained popularity during the century, when ouija boards were used by the upper classes as a source of entertainment. Investigations during this period revealed widespread fraud—with some practitioners employing techniques used by stage magicians—and the practice began to lose credibility, fraud is still rife in the medium/psychic industry, with cases of deception and trickery being discovered to this day. Scientific researchers have attempted to ascertain the validity of claims of mediumship, an experiment undertaken by the British Psychological Society led to the conclusion that the test subjects demonstrated no mediumistic ability. Other forms involve materializations of the spirit or the presence of a voice, the practice is associated with several religious-belief systems such as Vodun, Spiritualism, Spiritism, Candomblé, Voodoo, Umbanda and some New Age groups. In Spiritism and Spiritualism the medium has the role of an intermediary between the world of the living and the world of spirit. Mediums claim that they can listen to and relay messages from spirits, or that they can allow a spirit to control their body and speak through it directly or by using automatic writing or drawing. Spiritualists classify types of mediumship into two categories, mental and physical, Mental mediums allegedly tune in to the spirit world by listening, sensing. During seances, mediums are said to go into trances, varying from light to deep, attempts to communicate with the dead and other living human beings, aka spirits, have been documented back to early human history. Mediumship became quite popular in the 19th-century United States and the United Kingdom after the rise of Spiritualism as a religious movement, Modern Spiritualism is said to date from practices and lectures of the Fox sisters in New York State in 1848. The trance mediums Paschal Beverly Randolph and Emma Hardinge Britten were among the most celebrated lecturers and authors on the subject in the mid-19th century, allan Kardec coined the term Spiritism around 1860. Kardec claimed that conversations with spirits by selected mediums were the basis of his The Spirits Book and later, his five-book collection, some scientists of the period who investigated spiritualism also became converts. They included chemist Robert Hare, physicist William Crookes and evolutionary biologist Alfred Russel Wallace, nobel laureate Pierre Curie took a very serious scientific interest in the work of medium Eusapia Palladino. Other prominent adherents included journalist and pacifist William T, Stead and physician and author Arthur Conan Doyle. After the exposure of the fraudulent use of magic tricks by physical mediums such as the Davenport Brothers. However, the religion and its beliefs continue in spite of this, with physical mediumship and seances falling out of practice, Spiritualism continues to be practiced, primarily through various denominational spiritualist churches in the United States, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom
.jpg)
